India: An Odyssey of Individuation of an Ancient Civilization

Carl Jung had an ambivalent relationship with the Soul of India. This issue of Spring explores the complexities of this relationship between Jung and India.

Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture

Spring, founded in 1941, is the oldest Jungian psychology journal in the world. Published twice a year, each issue explores from the perspective of depth psychology a theme of contemporary relevance and contains articles as well as book and film reviews. Contributors include Jungian analysts, scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, and cultural commentators.

Carl Jung’s interest in India, and specifically in Hinduism and Buddhism, will be obvious to anyone who has even superficially read his work. Nevertheless, its significance is often ignored or minimized. This issue of Spring aims to show just how extensive and fraught Jung’s ties to India were and to present attempts from a number of directions to plumb the meaning of the relationship and, in the spirit of active imagination, to “dream it onward” into the present and future. In this issue we will focus mostly on Jung’s connections with Hindu thought. Buddhism and Hinduism in complex ways grew out of one another, so it is inevitable that there will be some overlap between the two. However, in spite of Jung’s professed preference for Buddhism, he made much more use of Hindu (and pre-Hindu and pre-Buddhist Vedic) thought, as will be evident from the papers in this issue. We hope that Jung and Indiawill open channels of thinking and practice with the potential to enrich Jungian understanding of Indian traditions and, equally, to stimulate creative interpretations and extensions of Jungian thought.

The papers for this volume fall rather clearly into four categories: (1) historical and comparative work integrating India and Jung (2) papers comparing and contrasting Jungian ideas with specific Indian traditions (3) Jungian interpretations of Hindu myths and rituals, and (4) personal memoirs combining Jungian and Indian themes. Despite the neat taxonomy, many of the papers touch on more than one category, and all in some way broach the fundamental questions that motivated this work in the first place: What unconscious, implied, nascent, or potential dialogue hangs poised in the field of thought and practice between Carl Jung’s psychology and the 3500-year-old tradition of Indian thought? And what can we do to help it emerge for the benefit of both?